Samantha Cameron, the Prime Minister's wife, has an ancestor who received
millions of pounds as compensation from the government when the slave trade
was abolished.

As the Prime Minister’s wife, Samantha Cameron is unlikely to agree to appear on the BBC’s popular genealogy programme Who Do You Think You Are?. It will be the viewers loss, as she has some fascinating ancestors.

Researchers have discovered that one of her kinsman was a slave owner who received the equivalent of millions of pounds as compensation from the British government when the trade in humans was abolished.

The Rev William Jolliffe, of Upper Tilgate, near Crawley in Sussex, was an entrepreneur whose company was responsible for the construction of Waterloo Bridge, Dartmoor Prison and the new London Bridge. He gave it all up for the church and became a vicar.

However, before he embraced the church, he became a beneficiary of slave ownership through complicated legal transactions in which “all claims due” to the failed merchant firm of Inglis Ellice and Co, which held mortgages on properties, were transferred to him.

In connection with this, the Ballenbouche Estate in St Lucia received £4,174, 5s, 8d for 164 slaves, which is about £3.25 million in today’s money.

Jolliffe’s son was the 1st Baronet Hylton, who served as home secretary and treasurer in the governments of the Earl of Derby. He married the daughter of the 4th Baronet Sheffield. Mrs Cameron’s father, Sir Reginald Sheffield, is the 8th baronet.

Jolliffe was among many wealthy families, including viscounts, baronets, MPs and vicars, who received generous government payouts after the 1833 Act of Parliament which emancipated slaves following the abolition of slavery in 1808.

The discovery about Mrs Cameron’s ancestor was made by researchers examining the records of the Slave Compensation Commission, which was set up to manage the £20 million fund.

Dr Nick Draper, from University College London, spent three years working on the records. He claims that as many as one fifth of wealthy Victorian Britons derived all or part of their fortunes from the slave economy and that up to 10 per cent of Britons who died in the 18th century had benefited.

“The amount of money available to the compensation fund reflects how much influence the elite had on the government,” he says. “But they were not so powerful they could not stop the Abolition of Slavery Bill going through.”